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Morgan In The Middle

Has anyone else noticed the similarities in the two characters Morgan Freeman portrays in his most recent DVD releases, Feast of Love and Gone Baby Gone? These two films could not be more different in all aspects.

Feast of Love, directed by Robert Benton, is about eight couples who grapple with the different levels of love. Morgan Freeman plays Harry, a professor who has taken a leave from the University to deal with the grief of losing his son to a drug overdose. Gone Baby Gone is the tale of a Boston community torn apart by a missing child. In this film, directed by Ben Affleck and starring little brother Casey, Freeman plays a police officer who heads a special unit which deals with missing children.

In Gone Baby Gone, we learn that the reason Freeman has created the missing child unit, which he heads, is because he and his wife were the victims of an abduction and murder of their own daughter. Similarity number one is that both characters played by Freeman have lost their only child and are struggling with the loss. In both films, Freeman and his characters wife adopt a child to replace the ones they have lost. In Feast of Love and Gone Baby Gone, Freeman plays a character with a bit of a God complex. Feast of Love showcases Harry as a man that is overly perceptive to the love connections around him, while still unable to control the grief that torments him. In Gone Baby Gone, Freeman is a man who thinks he is perceptive enough to decide right and wrong in a situation that does not fluctuate on the moral compass, but instead is a bulls-eye for God-like behavior.

Again, these two films are completely different and maybe it is a lack of variety with the typecasting of Morgan Freeman. I enjoy Mr. Freeman in films, but I do consider him a safe bet. Sometimes being a safe bet can mean being unable to surprise the audience with a range of emotions. In Feast of Love, his character is given more screen time than in Gone Baby Gone, but in the latter his character is more of the missing puzzle piece to the entire film. I recommend seeing both of these DVD rentals, especially if it means getting to skip The Bucket List.